Human society does seem obsessed with performance. The word describes many contexts, from the board room to the bedroom and the classroom to the locker room. There’s also the range of ideas that define excellence, from beating revenue and profit forecasts for the analysts to breaking the last record in any extreme sport, even if that effort risks death. When leaders talk with me as their generative coach, performance always enters the conversation as if that’s the holy grail. Ultimately, they discover that each person’s definition of performance excellence determines what sustains or falls short. Leaders also learn how to navigate the continuous journey inherent in generating performance excellence over a lifetime.
Wholeness, specifically Generative Wholeness™, is a state that sustains performance excellence and results from generative coaching. Why? Because each person uniquely defines the choices and mindset that empowers their life experience. People who choose to lead in systems of any kind learn how to deliberately choose how to adapt as uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity continue to present challenges. Through coaching, each leader learns to notice their flow of empowerment. By pausing to reflect, a leader identifies their preferred rhythm on the job. Leaders discover when habits and preferences accelerate work and when those preferences produce breakdowns. The breakdowns often reveal out-of-date habits rather than something inherently wrong or bad. Instead, the environment, context, and relationships have changed. Unrecognized what changed created undesirable consequences. Failure to perceive when something in the systems of their lives shifts, personal or professional, results in leaders staying with habits until the challenge of the breakdown becomes unbearable. Not only is this unconscious process costly financially, but it also creates emotional and physical fatigue.
Because the physical human experience greatly tolerates the strain from effort, unacknowledged fatigue operates without notice until it’s acute. Some leaders default to a belief that the collateral damage to their well-being from strain and associated stress is the price to pay when an organization prioritizes constant speed to produce results. As one of my wise mentors once said, that’s like trying to cost-cut your way to growth; it doesn’t work. As appealing as habits and preferences built upon hard-won experience and developed knowledge and capabilities are for our chosen lifestyle and livelihood, they ultimately backfire. It’s a cliché that’s also true; change is constant and eventually reduces the value and effectiveness of our habits. In other words, our habits have a shelf life, after which they stop accelerating our work and cause a slowdown, leading to stoppage. However, not all changes are the same, nor do they produce the same disruptive effect on our performance and well-being. That means a leader’s ability to discern the impact of shifts and change more thoughtfully and systemically offers advantages.
Being generative involves four specific capacities: originate, create, learn, and produce. A more adaptive rhythm results when leaders deliberately choose to exercise these capacities concurrently. Let’s transform this abstract idea into a practical example. In this client scenario, a leader recently promoted to an executive committee role with triple the number of employees and associated budget realized that this promotion required a new rhythm. Wired to produce results, this leader’s knowledge base and technical experience were not the reason for the promotion. It was the leader’s character, leadership principles, and commitment to workforce empowerment that the organization valued. This leader felt appreciated and seen as a respected executive. At the same time, a values conflict emerged. Producing results through his technical knowledge and ability to originate new ideas was competing with creating empowered teams whose technical knowledge and ability far exceeded his own. The organization rewarded something different from what this leader had done for so long. This leader realized he must transform his identity and definition of success that had generated performance excellence before.
Perhaps you’ve noticed how quickly human knowledge grows. The last report showed that it doubles within days, not years. Knowledge and routine practices that deploy that knowledge soon expire. That means all leaders face this example of a values conflict associated with the definition of performance excellence based on something outside of us – knowledge of something else and experience in using that knowledge. What transforms resides in shifting our attention toward learning and creating an environment beyond right and wrong that recognizes there can be many right answers. Ultimately, leadership transforms by learning to discern which right answers optimize the most excellent result with the least expense and potentially harmful consequence.
You may have read that last sentence and had to take a deep breath. That’s good. Taking a breath to pull back for perspective provides the moments essential for expanding discernment. Unless we pause our habitual reaction, we miss the new information and elements of a situation that hold the seed of innovation, the point of leverage to create an alternative, and to learn from others with experience that differs from our own. What the organization now expected from this leader focused on building an environment for extreme innovation. Instead of reliable and repeatable results, the key to performance excellence centers on developing leaders to learn fast through experimentation as they discern many right answers and choose among them to produce final products. Generating performance excellence requires an inside-out mindset and an unwavering belief in the wholeness of each person to tap into resourcefulness and innate creativity, especially in the moments of not knowing.
The expansive journey of leading others to originate, create, learn, and produce highly desirable results begins within. As new senses are awakened that value pausing to see beyond habit and preference and recognize what’s genuinely occurring, leaders model and mentor their teams to express more of their potential. Here’s a question I’ll leave with you to ponder as you consider the client scenario and the analogous experience you have each day in your leadership role. What resourcefulness do you possess that reminds you of your privilege and fulfills your responsibility to witness another being express their full potency? The leader in my example realized that his greatest joy at work comes from empowering others so that desirable results occur versus achieving results alone or having that as an isolated goal. Witnessing the contribution to empower another person’s life and livelihood becomes the destination available every moment.